Mind and faith His philosophy and his faith

In the summer of 1989, in a chance conversation by the roadside, Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport asked him how he approached a qualifying lap. Senna tapped his forehead.

It must be up here … You must know in your own mind that you can do it, when you set off on a qualifying run. If you don’t succeed then you are to blame, you have failed in total commitment, of everything, but everything.

… I must admit that when I pull my visor down and drive out of the pit garage on a qualifying run, my heart does beat a little faster. But only for a moment.

Jenkinson watched him do it. Before a run Senna sat in the car, very relaxed, reading the live timing on the screen his mechanics set on the scuttle, learning the pattern of the cars on the track, and choosing his moment. Once, as he crossed the line to start a flying lap, he saw two cars leave the pits ahead of him; he lifted at once, cruised round slowly to let them get five seconds clear, and took his flying lap next time round. Onlookers measured a gap in seconds, Jenkinson wrote; Senna measured it in distance.

The preparation began days earlier. Hiroshi Nakabe, a Japanese writer who walked back to the hotel with him on the Thursday night of a Grand Prix week, watched him go into what Nakabe calls his thinking time. Alone, he ran the race in his head over and over, from the shape of each corner to the state of the track, in rain, in cloud and in sun. He told Nakabe that the endless hours were fun, and called it brain simulation, or meditation.

His engineers saw the same mind from the other side of the pit wall. Pat Symonds, his engineer at Toleman in 1984, found that before cars carried data loggers he could remember every detail of every lap, down to the revs out of each corner. At McLaren, Steve Nichols could barely fill in the air temperature on the set-up sheet before a debrief that went through every setting at every corner for two hours, even when the car was very good.

I do try very hard to understand everything and anything that happens around me. Not only in the car but in my behaviour as a professional on the circuit, outside, in the garage and so on, and it takes a lot of energy. At the end of every day I feel very tired, because I just give everything I have. It drains me completely.

The tunnel

In the last qualifying session at Monaco, on Saturday 14 May 1988, he already had pole position and kept going. He finished 1.427 seconds faster than his team-mate, Alain Prost, in the same car.

That day, I suddenly realized that I was no longer driving conscious. And I was in a different dimension, for me. The circuit for me was a tunnel, which I was just going, going, going. And I realize I was well beyond my conscious understanding.

He told the story more than once, and the versions differ. To Gerald Donaldson in 1990 he said that it frightened him, because he had been beyond his conscious understanding, and that he kept such experiences alive in himself because they mattered for his self-preservation. In Portuguese, to Playboy that August, he said that the distinction between man and machine had ceased to exist; that after five laps something jolted him awake to the danger he was in; that his body began to shake; and that he did not know the territory of the unconscious he had been entering.

I was doing it almost in a subconscious way. I could not really cope with that in a manner that I could find easy… I stopped. I never said anything to anybody, not until months later.

… To that intensity, no. But in a lower level… There’s no need to go there any more. I know some of the reasons I went to that limit, because I wanted to do more and more, and better and better, which pushed me further and further. The desire to go further was so big…

The next day he led the race by about 50 seconds, and on lap 67 he crashed into the barrier at Portier. He walked straight to his flat, not to the pits.

His post-accident emotion was pure anger with himself, and he couldn’t cope with it at all. He actually walked back to his apartment, and it was two or three hours before he surfaced.

Ron Dennis, McLaren’s team principal, put the crash down to a lapse in concentration, nothing more. Senna came to see it otherwise. It was not just a driving error, he told Playboy, but the result of an inner struggle, and a sign that God was there, waiting to give him His hand.

A Catholic who did not like Mass

He had been brought up a Catholic, in São Paulo. In 1990 he told Donaldson how he had come back to his faith.

I am religious. I believe in God, through Jesus. I was brought up that way, was maybe drifting away from it, but suddenly turned the other way. Things that have happened in my racing career contributed a lot to my change of direction. It was a buildup of things that reached a peak and then I had a kind of crisis. Monaco was the peak and it made me realize a lot of things.

It is something that is difficult to talk about, very touching for me. But it is something unique in life, something that can hold you, can support you, when you are most vulnerable. It has made me a better man. I am a better human being now than I was before this. I am a better in everything I am and everything I do.

That same year he still called himself a Catholic, though not one who cared for Mass.

Gosto quando ela está vazia, tranquila, em paz. Sou católico, mas não curto missa. Não tem nada de especial nem de gostoso nesse culto. … Acontece que o ritual não tem nada a ver, é muito superficial. Não é o meu culto, com certeza.

I like it when it’s empty, quiet, at peace. I’m Catholic, but I don’t enjoy Mass. There’s nothing special or enjoyable in that service. … The thing is, the ritual means nothing to me; it’s very superficial. It’s certainly not my form of worship.

The new direction came partly through his sister. Viviane had become an evangelical Christian through a Christian student movement, and Ayrton and their mother followed her, gently, by the account of the biographer Ernesto Rodrigues. From the Monaco crash onwards, Rodrigues writes, the former Formula One driver Alex Dias Ribeiro was one of the guides of Ayrton’s evangelical initiation, and Ribeiro has said that he gave him a Bible in modern Portuguese. A missionary friend of Viviane’s, Neuza Itioka, remembers him kneeling on the floor of his living room to ask Jesus into his life. She dates it to the middle of 1989; Ribeiro puts the first prayer, which Viviane arranged, at the start of the 1988 season. Theirs are accounts given decades later, and they do not agree.

When he died, Folha de S.Paulo reported that he had attended an evangelical church, Renascer em Cristo; the family’s spokesman called the Sennas evangelical; and the private service before the lying in state was led by a Presbyterian pastor, Sabatini Lalli, Viviane’s father-in-law. No single label fits him. He was a devout Christian, raised a Catholic, whose faith after 1988 was his own, and centred on the Bible.

Prayer and visions

On TV Cultura’s Roda Viva in December 1986 he was asked how he relaxed.

O que ajuda no medo, na segurança, para você ficar mais natural, no meu caso, é rezar. No que eu entro no carro de corrida, toda vez, eu rezo. E é uma forma que eu encontro de ficar normal, natural, tirar aquela tensão, aquele nervosismo, aquele ímpeto e aquilo faz com que eu fique bem tranquilo, e na hora que o carro sai se torna natural.

What helps with fear, with feeling secure, with being more natural, in my case, is praying. Every time I get into the racing car, I pray. It’s a way I’ve found to be normal, natural, to take away that tension, that nervousness, that impetuousness, and it makes me very calm, and when the car pulls away it becomes natural.

Galvão Bueno asked whether he prayed not to be hurt or to win. He held up two fingers: both. On the same programme he said that at Estoril in 1985, where he won for the first time, he had gone off twice and had not crashed because he had been held, and he joined his hands and pointed upwards. In English, at the time, he called the same moments luck.

Of Suzuka in 1988, where he won his first title, he said on film:

I started being thankful as I was doing the last lap. I thanked God. I couldn’t believe I was actually going to win the Championship with all the anxiety and tension. I felt His presence. I visualized, I saw God. It was a special moment in my life. An enormous feeling. I have registered it in my memory, and it remains a part of me.

To Playboy, two years later, he described it at length. He had been thanking God for the title as he drove the last lap.

Mesmo orando, eu estava superconcentrado, me preparando para uma curva longa, de 180 graus, quando vi a imagem de Jesus. … Ao mesmo tempo em que tinha essa imagem incrível, eu guiava um carro de corrida.

Even while praying I was super-concentrated, getting ready for a long, 180-degree corner, when I saw the image of Jesus. … At the same time as I had this incredible image, I was driving a racing car.

He saw the figure immense, above the ground, in light, rising to the sky; he crossed the line roaring inside his helmet, beating it with his hand and weeping. He put the vision on the last racing lap, not on the slowing-down lap where it is often retold. At Monaco in May 1990, he told the same interviewer, he saw himself from outside the car in the Sunday warm-up, surrounded by a white line, a kind of wave, which he took as strength and protection. Before the start, for once, he smiled. He won.

He knew how it sounded. In the eyes of people who had no faith, he said, it was all madness, nonsense, and that made it awkward for him to talk about.

The charge

Prost, confirmed as champion by the appeal court a few days before, told the press in Adelaide on 2 November 1989 that Senna’s trouble was that, because he believed in God, he did not think he could be killed. He said it on camera too.

Ayrton has a small problem. He thinks that he can’t kill himself because he believes in God and things like this. And I think that’s very dangerous for the other drivers.

Because I believe in God and have faith in God, it doesn’t mean I am immortal. It doesn’t mean I am immune, as has been claimed. I am as scared as anyone of getting hurt, especially driving a Formula One car. It’s a constant danger.

He told Donaldson that the idea was absurd: he was very aware of the danger, and used that awareness to keep himself alive. To Playboy he put it plainly.

O medo vem antes da corrida, quando estou só, comigo mesmo. … Tenho muito receio, não só de morrer como de me machucar. O que é bom, pois é um sentimento de preservação da vida, que não me deixa passar de certos limites.

The fear comes before the race, when I’m alone, with myself. … I’m very wary, not only of dying but of getting hurt. Which is good, because it’s a feeling of self-preservation that doesn’t let me go beyond certain limits.

Others made up their own minds. Dennis thought Prost’s view had grown from Senna’s attempts to explain his Monaco lap; in reality, Dennis said, he was simply a phenomenal racing driver. The journalist Mike Doodson wrote that there was no place in sport for God-botherers, and that it was hypocritical to ask God to favour anyone. Senna froze him out. When Doodson followed him from a hotel lift in Hungary at least two years later, Senna told him it was very complicated, and that he was not prepared to discuss it.

The hardest question was how the faith sat beside the driving. Prost came to think that Senna had his own rules, believed in them, and really did not know when he was in the wrong. On the night of their collision at Suzuka in 1990, by Sid Watkins’s account, Senna admitted to him in private that it had been deliberate; in public he defended it on camera, and a year later said that he had decided before the start what he would do. His own words on it are in In his words.

The last morning

The film Senna carries an account of the morning of 1 May 1994, at Imola, attributed to his sister Viviane.

On that morning when he woke up, he asked God to talk to him. He opened the Bible and read a passage which said God would give him the greatest of all gifts. Which was God himself.

Which passage he read has never been identified. The words on his grave at Morumby, told in Farewell, adapt a verse from St Paul’s letter to the Romans; no source says who chose them. They say that nothing can separate him from the love of God.